>>>>Jane Through The Seasons

Cheers to the blessing that is & was 2016! If 2017 finds you and me breathing, I pray it may be to us that which we need to be more loving and laughing more.
XX Jane

it is really the 'good' emphasis tags. the 'bye,' our nods in reflection's haze: you have me altered: inside tuned more;  leaving revelations within self,  to unfurl in time under guide of  that true and old germinating song, luck.
thank you for everything. - j

A Lot to Digest
by Hafiz*

There is a place between knowing you are priceless

and at the same time recognizing you are what is
stepped over in a street

after a horse just left what they do in those
pretty brown clumps, of useful organic matter.

Somewhere between those poles, live if you can.
For anywhere else really won't suit you or serve

a special work that comes to those who
have achieved real equilibrium, a synchronistic
balance with all, all you have ever known.

This may sound like a lot to digest: suns are waiting
to emanate from your pores,

you will have to factor that in someday, I will help
you.

There is a place between knowing you are priceless
and...

---
*From A Year With Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

a skeletal press printing - j

It has been a goal of mine, for some time now, to practice living gratefully on a daily basis. Thus it  seemed natural that I would want to decide whether or not there is anything to be even grateful for in the first place. It is like that question one throws at one’s parent(s), at that teen age when one is allowed to be a proper monster. So one may say something like; “Well I did not ask you to birth me, did I? For all I know you and your lover were having a grand time and I just sort of happened, didn’t I? But you chose to keep me! Didn’t you? So forgive me, pretty please, if I am a disappointment. I am therefore not entirely to blame, am I? You share the blame in a few things like: 1, choosing to have sex, and 2, choosing to birth me, and 3, choosing to think I would not be a disappointment to you!” Right. >:) But sooner or later one must admit that there is a bit of a catch in this sort of blame sharing. And this is the question of why one chooses to live. Yes, life is gifted …

Well, someone must stand up for wrinkled clothes! And I have volunteered, too willingly, to be that very person. But this shoot is not about the waves that texturize clothes, it is a tribute to the wrinkles that attempt to trace the pulse of our lives, and that breathless exit we call death. 
And yet this shoot is just another way of stilling, in act, a chant that has been ringing my being for days now. It goes like this: 
Please GIVE me your kindest N! and GIVE me your sweetest A! please GIVE me your courageous N! and GIVE me your most beautiful A! AND WHAT SPELLS?! N A N A!!!!  
I love you woman, and you know it is the sort of love that even death cannot woo breath from.
You were and are a glorious BLAST! - A

Cowards die many times before their deaths;  The valiant never taste death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end Will come when it will come.
--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
I was made to memorize the above poem when I was in the sixth grade. And, as a class, we recited it every morning. This is the only poem that I know by heart (with a forgotten word here and there). I am not afraid of my dying or that of my loved ones. I think death a devastating blessing. It is, after all, the only certainty for all living beings. As suggested by the poem above, I was brought up in an environment which sort of prepared one to face death head-on. Every Ghanaian knows that no one goes to a funeral to cry! I mean yes, we share tears here and there, but the majority of the time is spent eating, dancing, and catching up with all those extended family members one has not seen since so-and-so died––for …

Death as Death
by Laura Riding

To conceive death as death
Is difficulty come by easily,
A blankness fallen among 
Images of understanding,
Death like a quick cold hand 
On the hot slow head of suicide. 
So it is come by easily
For one instant. Then again furnaces
Roar in the ears, then again hell revolves, 
And the elastic eye holds paradise
At visible length from blindness,
And dazedly the body echoes
‘Like this, like this, like nothing else.'

Like nothing––a similarity
Without resemblance. The prophetic eye, 
Closing upon difficulty,
Opens upon comparison,
Halving the actuality
As a gift too plain, for which
Gratitude has no language,

Foresight no vision.

---

For Nana -- Jane

So Long for Nana
my feelings spell you as peace in dazzling happiness  awaiting in merriment in foreverandeverandeverandever
so soon is where  we laugh without barricades in love our fingers entwined againagainagain --- Akweley